


Nae doubt but ye may get a sight

by originally



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Gen, Halloween, trick or treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-30
Updated: 2014-10-30
Packaged: 2018-02-18 16:32:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2355116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/originally/pseuds/originally
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Coppers are not Halloween fans, but some of the old traditions are alive and well at the Folly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nae doubt but ye may get a sight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Philomytha](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Philomytha/gifts).



As a copper, I’ve always hated Halloween, for the most part due to Trick or Treating. Though the Scots have been guising for over a century and celebrating Samhainn long before that, Trick or Treating is seen as an invasive species, one of those crass American imports that people with names like Patriotic of Richmond upon Thames write letters to _The Telegraph_ about. As usual, though, it’s more like we Brits have stolen a custom from another culture and utterly missed the point, like barbecuing or Costa Coffee. Americans, now, they take Halloween seriously. You get millionaires decorating their mansions as haunted houses, celebrities Instagraming their costumes and even interestingly-themed murders. Here, it’s just an excuse for the shops to sell us cheap tat and for gangs of youths to make a bloody nuisance of themselves, terrorising OAPs and getting flour and eggs all over everything. No PC worth their salt wants to be working a shift on Halloween these days. Since becoming an apprentice wizard, however, I’ve developed a bit of a different perspective on it. Discovering that ghosts and vampires and whatever Molly is are real will tend to do that, I suppose.

I woke on the 31st of October to the sound of the phone ringing. When I answered it, there was no one there. This, unsurprisingly, did not get my day off to a good start. I went down to breakfast, muttering dark things about teenagers, to find that Molly had apparently carved a series of increasingly grotesque faces into a load of pumpkins, which she had then arranged on the long serving table so they grinned at you disconcertingly whilst you tried to eat your full English. At least, I assumed it was Molly. Nightingale struck me as the letter-writing type when it came to American culture insomuch as he engaged with modern life at all, and there wasn’t anyone else. My stomach gave an unpleasant lurch when I thought about why that was, so I tried to avoid doing so as much as possible. It didn’t help that there was a creepy extra place set at the table for no one, with a plate of food and everything. I shuddered; for some reason, I’d lost my appetite. I slipped the rest of my bacon to Toby and decided it was time to get to work. And by ‘work’, I meant magic.

Nightingale point-blank refused to let me learn Varvara’s frost spell, but I’d managed to convince him to teach me the forma to make water. Baby steps and all that. I went down into the shooting range to practice. I’d been working on this one for a couple of weeks now and I thought I’d just about got it down. Nightingale had stopped wearing a mac over his suits and honest to god galoshes over his shoes, at least, which I took as a good sign. My first attempts at _aquam_ had been shapeless and disorganised, sloshing randomly down after they appeared onto whatever happened to be underneath them. Which, most of the time, was me. To be honest, it felt a bit like how I imagined dating Beverley Brook might turn out. It was interesting stuff, though; I assumed that the forma must pull moisture out of the air, mostly because I didn’t like to think about it pulling moisture out of me. Eventually I’d learned to use _scindere_ to give the water shape, forming what were essentially water bombs without the balloons. These were what I was currently attempting to combine with _impello_ and move around. It was tricky stuff and took massive amounts of concentration, which is how I ended up dropping one of them on my head when the phone rang.

Spluttering and shivering and looking rather a lot like a drowned rat, I traipsed back up to the atrium to answer it, squelching as I went. I half-expected Molly to pop out and start mopping up behind me, but, unusually, she was nowhere to be seen. I grabbed the ancient-looking phone from its cradle.

“Hello?” I said, grumpily.

There was nothing on the other end but static. Not even any creepy mouth-breathing or teenage sniggering. I said hello again, but there was still no reply. Probably just BT testing the line, I thought, and squelched off to change.

I spent the afternoon doing paperwork. By six my stomach was rumbling something fierce and it was dark outside. When I got into the dining room, I found that Nightingale wasn't there but once again, someone had set an extra place and put a load more Jack-o-Lanterns on the table. I shivered, and tried to ignore all of that as I put some food onto a plate. My mobile vibrated in my pocket and I fished it out with a long-suffering sigh. Well, I figured I could indulge in some petulance when there was no one around to hear it.

“DC Grant,” I said, and again there was nothing but static. "Listen, sunshine," I started, using my 'you didn't really want to do that, did you?' copper voice. They have classes in it at Hendon. "I could do you for wasting police –" I broke off abruptly when a horrible sensation of coldness washed over me, giving me one of those full-body shudders like when someone walks over your grave (and I tried desperately not to take that last thought too literally). The final straw was Toby unexpectedly breaking into a frenzy of barking right behind me. I spun around, my brain reaching automatically for a spell — which, unfortunately, turned out to be _aquam impello._ A torrent of water burst out of thin air, drenching everything in the room, including me, the dog, and Molly’s collection of pumpkins.

The effect was instantaneous. 

The moment the candles were extinguished a wind whipped up, swirling and howling and sending the silverware flying around the room like a hail of bullets. Impaled on a cake fork was not how I intended to go, so I grabbed Toby and dived under the table. As if from far away, I heard an awful wail start up, an inhuman sound that made all the hair on my body stand on end. Whatever the fuck this was, it didn’t sound good.

Suddenly, Nightingale burst into the room, brandishing his staff in one hand and holding a basket of… were those scones? Some kind of biscuits? I took a moment out of my abject terror to boggle.

“A soul!” he cried in his cut-glass tones. “A soul! A soul cake!” He tossed one of the scones to me and I scrambled to pick it up. He was still chanting. “Any good thing to make us all merry.” He sounded anything but. It didn’t seem to be having the desired effect on the whirlwind, either, which was raging harder than ever.

“What –” I started, but he motioned for me to, essentially, shut the fuck up and eat the cake, so I did. It tasted Christmassy.

“One for Peter, two for Paul,” yelled Nightingale over the sound of breaking china and whizzing cutlery, “three for Him who made us all.”

Everything fell still and silent. Nightingale straightened his suit. Me and Toby made our sorry, bedraggled way out from under the table with our tails tucked firmly between our legs.

“So,” I began, and withered under Nightingale’s glare. “Er. Sorry?”

“Peter,” he said, “what have I told you about using magic at the dining table?”

“What was that?” I said, manfully ignoring the reprimand. “I thought nothing could get past the forcefield – er, protective wards?” I amended, as he continued to glare at me.

“It can’t,” he said, “or at least, not usually. All Hallow’s Eve is an exception, a weak point between the world of the living and the spirit realm.”

I mouthed the words ‘spirit realm’ to myself contemplatively. “So that was – what? An evil spirit?”

“Something like that,” Nightingale said, sounding put-upon. He began to re-light all the candles using some very impressive precision fireballs.

“An evil spirit was prank-calling me. Huh," I said, and then remembered something. "What was all that screaming in aid of? Was it doing some kind of magic?”

“What?” he said, nonplussed. “Oh no, that was Molly.”

Equal parts interesting and terrifying. I filed that titbit away for future use. “And, er, your – chanting?” I felt the corners of my mouth twitch.

His cheeks coloured. “There is some magic, Peter,” he said, injecting a bit of extra haughtiness into his tone, “that pre-dates Newton’s codification by several centuries.”

I grinned at him. “So what does Baa Baa Black Sheep summon?”

He gave me such a dark look that I immediately decided I'd rather not know.

“Come on,” I said instead, “let’s go and see if Molly wants to scare some teenagers.”

It turns out I still bloody hate Trick or Treaters.

**Author's Note:**

>  _Nae doubt but ye may get a sight!_  
>  Great cause ye hae to fear it;  
> For mony a ane has gotten a fright,  
> An' liv'd an' died deleerit,  
> On sic a night.  
> \-- Rabbie Burns, _Halloween_.


End file.
